Attachment and emotion regulation in late adopted adolescents.

Secure attachment relationships with caregivers represent the ground for the development of emotion regulation strategies in infancy as well as later on. Adolescence represents a critical stage for late-adopted adolescents due to a revision of their IWMs of attachment. This revision may also imply changes in the underlined emotion regulation strategies. This study aimed at assessing individual differences of attachment representations in emotion regulation strategies in a sample of 46 late-adopted adolescents. The FFI, assessing attachment representations, and the ERQ-CA, assessing emotion regulation, were administered. Despite no differences between secure-insecure classifications in emotion regulation strategies were found, expressive suppression was negatively correlated with social competence and self-esteem and it was positively correlated with anger toward mother. Further studies are needed to understand the relation among the high use of expressive suppression, low level of social competence, self-esteem and high level of anger toward mother.